You walk into the kitchen and stop. Why did you come in here?

Your wife asks you something while you're reading a work email. You have to ask her to repeat it. Three times. And then you've lost your place in the email anyway.

You're driving somewhere familiar—and suddenly realize you've overshot your junction. The destination you were holding in your mind just... dissolved.

These aren't occasional lapses. They're happening daily. And if you're like most people experiencing this pattern, one fear is growing louder than all the others:

Am I losing my mind?

The Fear Behind Every Memory Lapse

When memory starts failing in your forties, fifties, or beyond, the mind goes to dark places. Alzheimer's. Dementia. Watching yourself slowly disappear.

Maybe you've seen it happen to someone you love. Maybe you've watched a parent struggle with a neurological condition and thought, Is this my future?

The fear is understandable. And when you notice memory difficulties getting worse—when you're the one noticing, not just others pointing it out—it feels like evidence. Like the beginning of the end.

But here's what most people never learn: not all memory failures are the same kind of problem.

And the difference matters enormously.

One Question That Changes the Diagnosis

When you forget why you walked into a room, or forget your destination while driving, or lose a task the moment someone interrupts you—ask yourself this:

Did the information vanish after you stored it? Or did it never quite land solidly in the first place?

Think about it carefully. When you walked toward the kitchen, was your intention crystal clear—and then it evaporated? Or was it more like... the intention was there, but thin. Fragile. Not deeply registered.

Like you said "I'm going to the kitchen for water," but it never properly filed.

This distinction is everything.

Two Memory Problems—One Matters More

Research from memory clinics has revealed something most people never hear about: there are two fundamentally different types of memory difficulty.

Storage deficits are what happens in conditions like dementia. Information gets recorded properly—filed away in the brain—but the filing cabinet itself breaks down over time. Memories degrade. They become inaccessible. The information was there, and then it wasn't.

Encoding deficits are completely different. The information never gets deeply recorded in the first place. The filing never happens properly. It's not that memories fade—they never formed with sufficient depth.

These aren't just different symptoms. They involve different brain regions. Different underlying mechanisms. And critically, different implications for what's actually happening to you.

So which pattern matches your experience?

A Simple Test for Your Memory Type

Think about something you've had to remember recently. A work project. A client meeting. Something you prepared for.

Once you really focused on it—once you took notes, organized the information visually, gave it your full attention—could you remember it?

Now think about the casual, everyday things. The drink order someone mentioned at a party. Why you opened a particular drawer. The task you were doing before the phone rang.

If you're finding that information you've properly encoded stays with you, while information you were supposed to just absorb naturally disappears—that's not a storage problem.

That's an encoding problem.

And encoding problems have a very different cause than most people assume.

What's Really Happening in Your Brain

When encoding fails, the issue isn't with your memory storage—it's with your attention system. Your working memory. The mental workspace where you hold and manipulate information before it gets filed.

Studies show that certain cognitive profiles involve marked deficits in what researchers call "central executive working memory." The processes that should be happening automatically—detecting what's important, allocating attention appropriately, holding an intention while doing something else—don't work the way they're designed to.

This explains why interruption is so devastating. You're holding an intention in your working memory. Someone interrupts. Your attention shifts. And that intention—never deeply encoded—simply dissolves.

It also explains why you might need to pause the TV when your family speaks. You're not losing memories. You're unable to divide your attention the way the situation demands. The information has nowhere to land while your mental workspace is already occupied.

Why Your Intentions Keep Disappearing

There's a specific term for remembering intentions: prospective memory. It's the capacity to remember to do things in the future. To hold a plan while moving toward executing it.

Research on prospective memory shows something striking: certain adults show clear, significant deficits in exactly this function. They recall and execute fewer of their own real-life intentions. They struggle with keeping appointments, giving messages to others, remembering why they entered a room.

Sound familiar?

This isn't "bad memory" in the general sense. Your recall of past facts might be perfectly fine. Tell you something interesting and you'll remember it. But "go to the kitchen and get water"? That's an intention. And intentions require your working memory to hold them online while you execute.

When working memory is compromised, intentions evaporate.

How Intelligence Masks the Problem

Here's what makes this confusing: if this is how your brain has always worked, you've probably been compensating for it your entire life.

Think about it. Lists everywhere. Different colored folders for different projects. Alarms on your phone for everything. Positioning objects where you'll trip over them so you don't forget. Visual systems. Color coding. Elaborate organizational scaffolding.

You might have thought everyone does this. Or that you're just "a visual person" who "likes being organized."

But what if these aren't preferences? What if they're workarounds—compensations for an encoding system that requires more support than others?

Research shows that intelligent adults can reach middle age before attention-based difficulties become apparent—even to themselves. Their intelligence lets them build compensatory systems. Their work ethic lets them put in the extra effort others don't need. The underlying difficulty stays hidden behind the scaffolding.

When Your Workarounds Stop Working

But compensation takes energy. Bandwidth. Cognitive resources.

And when life gets more demanding—more clients, more complexity, emotional load from family situations, the accumulating pressures of middle age—the compensation can start to fail.

The strategies that worked before required mental bandwidth that's now being consumed elsewhere. The underlying difficulty shows through. And what was manageable becomes impossible.

If your memory difficulties have worsened in the last year or two—if you're noticing them yourself when previously only others mentioned them—this might not be decline.

This might be your compensation capacity being exceeded.

Does This Pattern Mean Dementia?

If your pattern fits what we've described—encoding difficulties rather than storage failures—the implications are significant.

This doesn't look like dementia. The pattern is wrong.

People whose memory storage is genuinely failing show different symptoms. They can't perform complex strategic tasks that require ongoing memory integration. They lose information that was properly encoded. The filing cabinet is breaking.

But if you're managing a team without micromanagement—if you're maintaining complex family relationships across multiple people—if you're succeeding at work that requires strategic thinking—these are not the patterns of failing memory storage.

These are the patterns of an encoding system that's always required more effort than it should.

What to Tell Your Doctor

Understanding the pattern doesn't give you a diagnosis. But it does give you a direction.

If this resonates—if your memory difficulties look more like encoding problems than storage failures—the appropriate next step is specialist assessment. A proper evaluation that can distinguish between different causes of memory difficulty.

What do you say to your doctor? Something like this:

"I've been very forgetful, and I'm uncertain whether it's ADHD-related, stress-related, or neurological. I'd like a referral for specialist assessment."

That covers all possibilities without presuming the answer. It acknowledges that you don't know—which is exactly why you need someone who can find out.

And if you read that sentence and immediately thought "I need to write that down"—that's not weakness. That's you knowing how your memory works and adapting to it. That's intelligence.

What Comes Next

If there is an underlying attention-based condition, proper diagnosis opens doors. Treatment options exist. Strategies become available. The exhausting compensation might become... less exhausting.

But that's the next chapter.

For now, what matters is this: your daily memory failures might not mean what you feared. The pattern of struggling to encode while retaining what's properly filed—the pattern of compensation systems that have always been necessary—the pattern of difficulties worsening when life demands increased—

This tells a different story than dementia.

A story that deserves proper investigation.

And potentially, a story with better options than you've allowed yourself to imagine.

What's Next

What happens in a specialist ADHD assessment, and what kinds of treatment or support are available if it's confirmed?